Chapter Three
The first thing Bryce noticed was his tongue.
It felt dry, heavy, and coated with gunk.
The second was the pounding behind his eyes.
He groaned and rolled onto his back, his stomach protesting.
The couch springs complained, and something slid off his stomach and hit the floor with a soft thud.
Blanket. Right. Someone had tucked him in.
Cracking one eye open, Bryce saw that the living room was a wreck.
There were empty bottles, a cold carton of noodles, two mismatched chopsticks stuck upright like antennae.
Morning light leaked around the blinds, too bright for his head, which felt two sizes too small and had a full marching band practicing inside it.
He squinted toward the kitchen. Coffee machine humming. Water running. Sage. Memory flickered from the previous night. His grin, the beer, the dare, that kiss. Bryce shut his eyes again. “Oh, hell no,” he muttered.
Pressing his palms over his face, Bryce tried to scrub the flash of memory away.
Nothing helped. His brain, ever the helpful biology major, decided to analyze it instead.
Drunken behavior. Impaired judgment. Simple cause and effect.Then another thought slipped in: Chemical reaction.
Dopamine surge. He groaned louder. “I am not writing a lab report about this.”
“Talking to yourself again?” Sage’s voice came from the kitchen. Too awake. Far too calm, all things considered.
Bryce cracked an eye open. Sage leaned against the counter, mug in hand, gray eyes clearer than they had any right to be at this hour. His hair was damp, shirt clean, jeans unwrinkled. Show-off.
“Coffee?” Sage asked.
“Please.”
Sage placed a mug on the table. “You were out cold. Didn’t even move when I tried to wake you.”
“Great. Love being an unresponsive corpse.” Bryce sat up, groaning as his spine popped and his stomach roiled. “Did I—uh—say anything stupid?”
Sage took a sip of his drink. “Define stupid.”
“Anything about, you know…experiments.”
“Ah.” Sage’s mouth twitched. “You mean the part where you declared we should ‘switch it up’ and then kissed me?”
Bryce froze, halfway through a gulp of coffee that immediately burned his tongue, causing him to hiss after he swallowed. “So that happened.”
“Yep.”
“Right. Cool.”
“Relax,” Sage told him. “You were drunk. I didn’t take it seriously.”
“Good,” Bryce shot out. The coffee mug rattled when he put it down. He wanted to say more. Maybe apologize, but his throat felt tight, so he went for humor instead. “Guess that’s another failed experiment.”
Sage snorted. “You’ve had worse.”
That should’ve made it easier, but it didn’t. The casual tone lodged in Bryce’s chest, right where the memory of that kiss still hummed, unwanted but stubborn.
Sage disappeared into his room, muttering something about class notes. Bryce sat on the sofa for a while, staring at the coffee mug like it held answers. Then he stood, shuffled to his room, and tried to bury himself in work.
Textbooks lay open across his desk: Cell Biology, Genetics in Context, the usual suspects.
He stared at the same sentence for five minutes before realizing he hadn’t taken any of it in.
Instead, his brain replayed the kiss again.
Soft, warm, far too short. He pushed back from the desk. “Nope. Not doing this.”
Bryce muttered to himself as he paced. “It was one kiss. Stupid. Drunk. You were just lonely. Alcohol messes with judgment. Everyone knows that.” But for every excuse, Bryce’s brain tossed back how he’d reacted.
Heart rate spike, muscle tension, heated response.
He could practically hear his physiology professor saying, ‘Attraction is just neurochemistry, Mr. Jones.’
“Yeah, well,” Bryce told the imaginary professor, “so is nausea.” He tried to laugh, but it came out strained.
Shoving the books aside, Bryce stripped and told himself a shower would clear his head. It didn’t. Warm water only gave him time to think about how he’d leaned in first. How Sage hadn’t immediately shoved him away. How his lips had been—
“Stop.” He slapped the faucet off and stood dripping in silence.
By the time Bryce wandered back into the kitchen, Sage was bent over his laptop, scribbling something on a pad of paper. His T-shirt had ridden up slightly, a strip of skin showing above the waistband of his jeans. Bryce’s eyes snagged there before he could stop them.
Observation, his inner scientist noted. Subject: Sage Everest. Environment: domestic. Stimulus: undefined.
He turned to the fridge just to have something to do. “You going to campus today?”
“Yeah. Need to hand in my mechanics report.” Sage didn’t look up. “You?”
“Bio lecture at one.” He grabbed a bottle of water, chugged half, then added, “I might hit the library after. Need to review enzyme kinetics before midterm.”
Sage glanced up then, a brief flash of gray eyes that hit Bryce harder than it should have. “You and your enzymes. They’ll survive if you take a night off.”
“Tell that to Dr. Franklin. Guy grades like he’s allergic to happiness.”
Sage laughed, and Bryce felt it low in his chest. He cleared his throat. “Anyway. I’ll be gone most of the day.”
Sage shrugged. “Don’t party too hard.”
“Yeah, right. I don’t think my stomach could handle any partying right now.” Bryce grabbed his bag before Sage could see the flush creeping up his neck.
***
The air outside was cold enough to bite. Bryce pulled his hood up and headed for the campus coffee shop, hoping caffeine and noise would drown the replay in his brain. Sage. The kiss. The way he’d felt. Bryce growled to himself and stomped toward his much-needed distraction.
Inside, the usual crowd filled the small tables with students hunched over laptops, couples sharing pastries, and someone crying quietly into a phone.
Normal life. Bryce joined his friends sitting at one of the tables — Mark, Dylan, and Harry — who were already deep in an argument about the new professor teaching Human Anatomy.
“Total nightmare,” Dylan groaned. “Pop quizzes every class.”
Mark smirked. “You’d hate him less if he wasn’t so hot.”
“He’s fifty.”
“Exactly. Hot and terrifying.”
Bryce laughed along, grateful for the distraction.
They moved on to weekend plans, Valentine’s jokes, and who was dating who.
He threw in a few sarcastic comments, but part of his mind stayed somewhere else entirely.
A certain pair of gray eyes, a warm laugh, that tiny tilt of Sage’s mouth when he smiled.
He tried to picture Layla instead. Couldn’t.
Every time he did, Sage’s face intruded.
He stirred his coffee, annoyed. What the hell is wrong with you?
Harry nudged him. “You look like you’re calculating the molecular structure of loneliness.”
“Hangover,” Bryce said.
“Right. The heartbreak hangover.”
“Something like that.”
The conversation drifted again, but Bryce barely listened. His stupid brain was busy cataloguing symptoms. Heart rate up, attention diverted, dopamine spike. You’re just having a weird rebound response, he told himself. Classic misdirection. Happens all the time.
He almost believed it.
***
That evening, Bryce stopped by the convenience store for snacks and a six-pack. The fluorescent lights made everything look harsher, even his reflection in the door glass. Same messy hair, same tired eyes, just a little more uncertainty showing in them.
Walking home, the city felt different to him. Muted, like he was half out of step with it. He thought about calling Layla, but didn’t. What would he even say? Hey, you were right. I’m emotionally unavailable, and I might’ve kissed my roommate.
He huffed a laugh that came out more like a sigh. He’d spent the day trying not to think about Sage but had ended up doing nothing but think about Sage.
At the apartment door, Bryce paused with his hand on the knob. Through the wood, he could hear Sage’s voice, low, talking to someone. Probably a group call with classmates. Bryce took several deep breaths, waiting a few seconds to get his heart under control before going in.
Sage glanced up from his laptop. “Hey.”
“Hey.” Bryce lifted the bag. “I have chips, salsa, hummus that looked fancy, and something labeled ‘party mix’ that I already regret.”
“Good. I’m starving.” Sage smiled, easy, unbothered.
Bryce managed a nod and went to put the drinks away.
His heart didn’t get the memo. It was still thudding like he’d run a sprint.
When Sage laughed at something on his screen, Bryce’s mind betrayed him again, replaying the sound against the memory of that kiss, how close they’d been, how natural it had felt for one dizzying second.
He swallowed hard, leaned against the counter, and stared at the wall until the feeling passed.
If it were just a chemical glitch, he thought, why does it keep replaying?